This Halloween marks the 7th Anniversary of the first public release of the original Natural Selection! To celebrate, please find below the first screenshots from Unknown Worlds' Natural Selection 2. Natural Selection was the most popular independent mod for Half-life and is now being re-made as a commercial sequel which will be released on Steam in 2010.

7 YEARS OF NS! FIRST SCREENS OF NS2

MOD TOOLS OUT IN A MONTH!

The first screenshot shows a squad of marines attacking some wall-running Skulks and a flying Lerk. The second shows the view from a Skulk with his trademark "bite-cam". Skulks use vent systems to ambush, attack and confuse unsuspecting marines.

Natural Selection 2 started life on the Source engine but is now running on our proprietary "Spark" engine. Spark allows small teams to make sophisticated games relatively quickly and without waiting. All changes to art, levels and even code are seen instantly in game.

We will be releasing the first piece of Spark (the level editor) in November to everyone that pre-orders NS2, so fans can start building levels. Unknown Worlds will be purchasing the best community levels to include in NS2. We release our other tools in the same manner before the game comes out as well.

Not to mention it's a very small team working on the game, so it's certainly a huge achievement for them.

These screenshots look on par with so called "AAA" titles out there to date, one AAA title in particular is the new AVP game and another being Aliens: colonial marines, which should I mention are being made by much larger teams.
The best part is that NS2 will only get better :D so that is freaking awesome!

I pre-ordered way back when the pre-orders were available, and I certainly don't regret it, especially with the level editor coming so soon!

Thanks so much for the support guys. It means a LOT to us. We spent a lot of time working on the original NS mod and to be able to make it a sustainable, commercial venture, as well as to be able to give something back to the mod community is a dream come true.

I like the fact that your supporting the mod community. It seems these days developers are shafting the PC community. Were alot of these developers started on the PC (aka InfinityWard/ and I just recently heard that the new AVP/Rebellion will be going the same route as InfinityWard with no dedicated servers but thats just a rumor.) They think they know what us PC consumers need.

When developers like you, show us that you need us and are willing to go as far as purchase community maps and support us. You have my purchase. Continue the great work! and show us more developer videos!

Very well written, plus you know the NS team is building this game with love and care and they will work the hell outta it, to ensure they go above and beyond all of the hefty expectations we place on them. Same with all indies, Overgrowth, Zero Gear etc.

O dang, shibang. Those look better than I initially thought they would. I think it's time to preorder.

My real question is, who's going to make the Full Starcraft Conversion skins and sounds that Natural Selection I made? Natural Selection is an excuse for us to feel like were playing Marines in Starcraft. :P

Here is my question, and please nobody take offense to this. Why would a game that is already offering a pre-order, release its first two in game screen shots? Does that sound strange to anyone else? I mean honestly, I never actually noticed...but they gave you a chance to buy the game before you actually ever saw it. (Sure, you could always say that the trailer or dev blogs were a way of viewing the game, but I dont think so because they didn't show any actual "game play") I'm not trying to be a hard *** or say this game is going to suck (because these screen shots do look awesome) but its odd that the dev team decided to take this rout.

Well, I mean, there was no preorder requirement :P I'm guessing that most preorders were people who loved NS1. That's the basis for the gameplay. If you played NS1 and loved it you'd be inclined to preorder. There was the teaser trailer that showed off the engine along with many concepts. So you knew what it was going to look like and you had an idea what the gameplay was going to be like. Since its a sequel you could assume its going to be a lot better to in terms of features. I've shelled out way more money going on less information. I think this game will be amazing, I loved NS1 and will be preordering very soon :)

A lot of indie games are going into creating their own game engine, one reason being that the other game engines seems flawed and limited to their needs, especially when the game industry is evolving into something greater...